World roundup: May 15 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Myanmar, Kenya, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

May 15, 1811: Paraguay’s May 14 Revolution, a military coup against Governor Bernardo de Velasco, succeeds in forcing him to create a three man governing junta including himself and two military appointees. The junta was the first in a series of governments that increasingly substituted local rule for colonial control from Spain. Although it was a very long road from here to Paraguay’s formal declaration of independence in 1842, May 14 and 15 are commemorated as Independence Day (well, “days”) in Paraguay today.

May 15, 1940: Brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald open a small restaurant called “McDonald’s Bar-B-Que” in San Bernardino, California, serving mostly, as the name says, barbecue. A few years later they streamlined the operation to focus on their most popular item, hamburgers. Since as far as I know there are no McDonald’s Bar-B-Que restaurants in existence anymore, I can only assume this disruptive change was the death-knell for their company, and it just goes to show you that innovation isn’t always a panacea. That’s today’s business tip.

May 15, 1948: The Arab-Israeli War begins. On a related note this is also “Nakba Day” (Dhikra al-Nakba or “Remembrance of the Catastrophe”), which marks the displacement/expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians from the territory of the state of Israel in the period leading up to and during the war.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

I didn’t have room in yesterday’s newsletter to mention it, but in addition to its report on the Israeli military’s (IDF) adherence to US requirements for military aid the Biden administration is also supposed to be assessing specific IDF units for possible restrictions under the “Leahy Law.” Here, as in the other report, you will likely not be surprised to learn that the administration is bending over backwards to avoid imposing any consequences:

Years before Oct. 7, soldiers and officers in four Israeli security force units committed what the U.S. State Department would later determine to be serious human rights violations against Palestinians.

In one incident in 2019, an Israel Defense Forces soldier shot and killed an unarmed Palestinian man on the side of a road in the West Bank. That soldier was given no jail time — only three months of community service.

Under the U.S. Leahy Laws, the government must disqualify any military or law enforcement unit from receiving assistance if there’s credible information that the group had committed violations like rape or extrajudicial killings, unless the offending entity has taken adequate steps to punish the perpetrator.

On Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Congress he had determined the punishments for the soldiers and officers in all four cases — including the community service sentence — to be adequate, according to a State Department memo to Congress. The units won’t be disqualified from receiving American military assistance. The names of the units were previously reported by Al-Monitor. ProPublica obtained the memo with Blinken’s justifications.

Again one has to wonder if “three months of community service” would be deemed an appropriate sentence for homicide were the perpetrator a member of any other country’s armed forces. The primary architect of Leahy, former US Senate staffer Tim Rieser, told ProPublica that the decision regarding the 2019 incident was “not consistent with how the law was written and how it was intended to be applied.” Blinken is still considering the case of a fifth IDF unit, known to be the “Netzah Yehuda” battalion, but if this is the standard it’s hard to imagine he’ll take any action against that unit either.

In other items: